It only remained to say something about Nick Reynolds, the third member of the original group.

And there is quite a bit to be said, because Nick Reynolds was the heart and soul of the seminal pop folk group The Kingston Trio.

With his college buddies Dave Guard (1934-1991) and Bob Shane (b. 1934), Reynolds and the Trio transformed American popular music, bringing traditional folk songs, sea chanteys, calypsos, world music, and more to an unprecedented level of popularity and visibility, selling more records between 1958 and 1961 than any other American musical act except Elvis Presley and outselling their (today) more respected predecessors, The Weavers, by a factor of five. The group's commercial success, widely belittled by folk purists at the time, paved the way for recording companies to sign and promote traditional musicians, singer-songwriters, topical/political musicians, and international performers - all because of the astounding album sales of the Kingston Trio between 1958 and 1961, more than $175 million in today's dollars.

The core of the Trio's sound was the soaring tenor harmony of Reynolds, and the breakneck energy of many of the group's signature numbers was derived from Nick's supersonic tenor guitar strumming and his masterful percussion accompaniment on bongos, conga, and boom-bams. The late singer/songwriter John Stewart, himself a Trio member for six years following Guard's departure, said that "Nick Reynolds was the real rhythm of the Kingston Trio." And Trio-mate and best friend Bob Shane wrote after Nick's passing, "Nobody could nail a harmony part like Nick. He could hit it immediately, exactly where it needed to be, absolutely note perfect, all on the natch. Pure genius."

Nick was easily the most accessible of the original group members - this despite the fact that for the predictably short period of his international celebrity he was probably the most easily identifiable of the KT, standing as he did nearly seven inches shorter than Guard and six than Shane. There is a section of the video below of "A Worried Man" where you can see Reynolds swarmed for an autograph and jostled by a group of Japanese school girls - he takes the buffeting with a wry smile and just keeps on signing. When I was a teenager in the group's heyday in the '60s, I was granted a short post-concert interview with the Trio for my local newspaper. Shane and Stewart were friendly and cooperative, but it was Reynolds who gave me a story to write, staying with me a quarter of an hour longer than the others and making sure that I had the kind of exclusive tidbits that every reporter of any age prizes. I met him again in 2003 at the Trio's fantasy camp in Arizona - and in each of the four subsequent camps he'd greet me with a "Hiya Jim! How've you been?" with no need for me to remind him of my name - and he did so with literally everyone of the several hundred people who came annually to the event.

Reynolds was nearly always self-deprecating about himself (he was a genuinely outstanding athlete, lithe and muscular til his death at 75 in 2008) and his career, referring to the historic success of the group as "just something we did when we were kids" or "we started doing it for the beer and the chicks and it got all out of hand for a while." On two occasions, however, he let slip comments that might have been nearer to his reaction in the '50s to the excoriating criticism that the group's free-handed but very lucrative adaptations of folk songs excited. In 2004, Nick was talking about his friendship with the late Irish folk star Paddy Clancy and his widow Mary when he interpolated, “People criticized us for not doing enough protest songs. What the heck did they know? You want to hear a protest song? Listen to the Clancy Brothers sing ‘Roddy McCorley!’" Even more so - in 2003, John Stewart and Reynolds duetted on "Sloop John B" in a rough, unrehearsed version . Even before the thunderous applause had subsided, Nick had grabbed the vocal mic and with an asperity in his voice that I found arresting said, "When we were first starting out, there were a lot of people calling us 'phony folksingers' and such. One man who stood up for us - one of the really righteous men - was the poet Carl Sandburg, who collected that song. He sent us all a really nice letter with autographed copies of his works The Lincoln Years. We never forgot that." There was a passion of wronged and wounded pride there, forty years after the event. It seemed like it was rather more than just beer and chicks for Reynolds - it was a good part of his life's work, something of which he was justifiably proud. A word more on that at the end of this article.

It was Reynolds' innate gregariousness and good humor that acted as the balancing point between the combustible temperaments of Guard and Shane, and when the former left the group, it was Reynolds who mentored the somewhat reticent and awkward 21-year-old John Stewart to the point that Stewart eventually became the primary arranger and onstage personality for the act - something that Stewart never forgot and never forgot to acknowledge until the day of his own death a few months before Reynolds. (In fact, San Francisco Bay-area resident Stewart was in San Diego visiting Reynolds at the latter's home when he collapsed from the stroke that took his life - after listening to several hours of KT recordings and reminiscing with Reynolds.)

What is often lost in remembering Reynolds as a person, however, is an appreciation of just how fine a performer he was, and the videos below give some indication of this. He had the most flexible voice in the group, having been a medium baritone with enough clarity and range to be able to sing most of the group's tenor harmonies. Reynolds was also a singularly expressive vocalist, as the first four of today's videos attest:

Hobo's Lullaby

The Mountains of Mourne

One More Town

The Wanderer

The perhaps more familiar high-energy Reynolds performances are typified in the next four clips:

MTA

A Worried Man

"Badman's Blunder"

"New York Girls"

And yet - there were plenty of fine vocalists in the pop folk era, as good as or better than Reynolds - the trained voices of the Chad Mitchell Trio members or Glenn Yarbrough's crystalline and honey-sweet tenor come to mind - and other groups that could play at least in the same ballpark as the Kingstons' high-energy performances. No, there was something more to the group and to Reynolds' contribution to it than syncopation and energy and good singing. What that was has been expressed perhaps most eloquently by Nick's son Josh, in the liner notes for the remarkable 2009 CD of a 1963 KT show called Flashback. Josh wrote:

"You hear the guitars and banjo kick in on 'Little Light,' that first upbeat sing-along song that gets everyone going. Rousing openers like that were a signature template to the Trio's live performances.

Then you hear Dad shout out 'All right!,' which is his signal to 'the boys' that things are moving, and then he brings the audience into it by yelling, 'Everybody sings!'

It hit me. That's it. 'Everybody sings!'

If there was one thing he cherished most about what he accomplished with the Trio, it's that he got everyone up and singing."

And in so doing, Reynolds and the Trio helped to complete what Pete Seeger and The Weavers had started but what their politics had prevented them from completing - the gifting back to the American public of its own folk heritage, a heritage that even back then show business had obscured with its often glitzy but shallow celebrity culture. And that was a priceless and ultimately enduring gift indeed.

2 comments:

This was an excellent article, capturing not only the essence of Nick, but the importance ot the Trio from a historical perspectice. I was never fortunate enought to have met Nick, but after this article, I fell like I know him a little better now. Thanks for the great bio.

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About This Site

Comparative Video 101 is a resource for performance videos of some of the classic popular folk songs of the last several decades with personal commentary on them by Jim Moran, a teacher of literature for nearly forty years and a folk musician and writer for a decade longer. He is also co-host of the "Roots Music And Beyond" radio program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.Some of these posts appeared originally on the Kingston Crossroads message board, and many of the profiled songs were performed by the classic pop folk group the Kingston Trio.The page will be updated once or more per month.Your comments are welcome.

Use the Google Search Bar above as you would use the Google web search. Enter the name of a song or artist, press "search," and the results will appear showing every mention of your search term in the 150+ articles on this blog. An alphabetical index of song titles is coming soon; until then, the Google Search This Blog will substitute for it.

A Note On The Posted Articles

Since Blogspot/Google has recently begun including readership statistics as part of its service to bloggers like me, I have become aware that the readership for these pages is far more extensive and international than I had ever dreamed, usually approaching 1,000 visitors per week from literally all around the world. I am profoundly appreciative of the interest in these posts and glad that folk music fans find enjoyment and value in them.

There are currently nearly two hundred articles here, and nearly all of the twelve hundred posted videos in those articles are from YouTube. Most readers will already know that because YouTube is another subsidiary of Google, the latter company is being sued for copyright infringement by a significant number of content providers like Sony-BMG and Warner's Music Group. YouTube/Google's normal response to infringement claims is to remove the disputed videos or ban them from certain countries in which the claims have been filed.

This, of course, has a profound effect on the content of posts like the ones in this blog. Videos that I have selected for any given article can be and often have been removed at any time without warning. I try where possible to replace deleted videos with other versions of the same performance or with similar renditions of the songs, though this is not always possible.

Policing the hundred plus posts to be sure that there are interesting and representative video performances is itself a major undertaking, one that involves a significant commitment of time. I hope that those of you good enough to stop by this blog will have a bit of patience. I review as many of the older articles as I can every week with the goal of maintaining the integrity of each, and sometimes this enables me to find newer, better, and more exciting performances of the songs profiled here.